In
the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its
usefulness to US power By
John Pilger Long
before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the
United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and
watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues
were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get
that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people.
We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you
do it? What's the secret?"
The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a totalitarian
state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is the opposite. Constitutional
freedoms unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship; the press is a
"fourth estate", a watchdog on democracy.
The journalism schools boast this reputation, the influential East Coast
press is especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of
record, the New York Times, with its masthead slogan: "All the news
that's fit to print."
It takes only a day or two back in the US to
be reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by
omission, and voluntary. The source of most Americans' information,
mainstream television, has been reduced to a set of marketing images shot
and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola commercial that flow seamlessly
into the actual commercials. Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is the model,
with its peep-shows of human tragedy. Non-American human beings are
generally
ignored, or treated with an anthropological curiosity reserved for
wildlife documentaries.
Not long ago, Kenneth Jarecke was talking about this censorship. Jarecke
is the American photographer who took the breath-catching picture of an
Iraqi burnt to a blackened cinder, petrified at the wheel of his vehicle
on the Basra Road where he, and hundreds of others, were massacred by
American pilots on their infamous "turkey shoot" at the end of
the Gulf war. In the United States, Jarecke's picture was suppressed for
months after what was more a slaughter than a war. "The whole US
press collaborated in keeping silent about the consequences of that
war," he said.
famous CBS anchorman Dan Rather told his prime-time
audience:
"There's one thing we can all agree on. It's the heroism of the
148 Americans who gave their lives so that freedom could live." What
he omitted to say was that a quarter of them had been killed, like their
British comrades, by other Americans. He made no mention of the Iraqi
dead, put at 200,000 by the Medical Educational Trust. That American
forces had deliberately bombed civilian infrastructure, such as water
treatment plants, was not reported at the time. Six months later, one
newspaper, Newsday, published in Long Island, New York, disclosed that
three US brigades "used snow plows mounted on tanks to bury thousands
of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than 70 miles of
trenches".
The other day, both the Washington Post and the New York Times referred to
Iraq without mentioning the million people now estimated to have died as a
direct result of sanctions imposed, via the UN, by the United States and
Britain. That, writes Brian Michael Goss of the University of Illinois, is
standard practice. Goss examined 630 articles on sanctions published in
the New York Times from 1996 to 1998. In those three years, just 20
articles - 3 per cent of the coverage - were critical of the policy or
dwelt upon its civilian impact. The rest reflected the US official line,
identifying 21 million people with Saddam Hussein. The scale of the
censorship is placed in perspective by Professors John and Karl Mueller,
of the University of Rochester. "Even if the UN estimates of the
human damage to Iraq are roughly correct," they write, sanctions have
caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all
so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history." A
third of the people of East Timor were put to death by the Suharto
dictatorship during Indonesia's 24-year occupation. Yet the American media
skirted this epic crime until shortly before the 1999 referendum. Their
silence was in striking contrast to the saturation coverage of the
"genocide" in Kosovo, used to justify the Nato bombing campaign,
and was in line with suppression of the post-bombing disclosure that there
was no genocide. In East Timor, the United States helped Suharto execute
his invasion, secretly and illegally, with weapons and aircraft. For most
of the 24 years of bloody occupation, the US media maintained a virtual
blackout on East Timor.
In the freest press on earth, humanity is
reported in terms of its usefulness to American power. Kosovo was a major
story; it demonstrated the "credibility" of Nato and America's
control over the Balkans. East Timor was a non-story, "a road bump on
the way to Indonesia", according to a State Department official. In a
study of the New York Times and Washington Post cited by Goss, 75 per cent
of the sources were government officials - a record not that far behind
the old Pravda. Truly independent reporters such as Seymour Hersh are
described, revealingly, as "dissidents" and
"advocates". What is most telling is the media's presumption of
innocence of the rapacious American imperial role, rather like Hollywood's
post-Vietnam celebration of America as a noble victim. In a lead editorial
recently, the New York Times identified the problems of the world, ranging
from poverty to terrorism to disease, as "challenges to American
safety and well-being". That the United States consumes a quarter of
the world's resources, controls the channels of world trade and the
institutions of inequality, and squeezes whole nations, such as Iraq, to
death, is simply not news. Monday
19th February 2001
The New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/200102190008.htm Washington
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